dubyprime wrote on Jul 27^th, 2012 at 12:12pm:

When demonstrating a lack of understanding and interest of both WF and healing amp in the Healers Friend thread.

Speaking of healing amp, a snazzy little icon right above the spellpower one showing HA values would be nice.

What worries me is that if you really boil it down and look at the actual content we got from the expansion you have 11 'epic quests' a good number of which take literally 2 minutes to complete, a couple of a decent length and difficulty, and a fucked raid. There are a couple of level 19 quests (3?) but you really can't count them as being of any use when you compare how much xp you get for those compared to the 20+ ones.

Then you have the challenges, which were decent xp, which has since been nerfed, so you are left hoping that you haven't done the old quests too much on normal while leveling.

Loot wise you have the hand in stuff, which can be decent, depending on what you have already (I'm finding it a PITA to slot stuff like GFL and Fort which are on nearly no new items other than one of the armours), you have the armours which can be nice, but if you want to make use of the set bonuses you have to get max PDK favor (wtf, seriously who decided that was a good idea). Some of the other items that drop in the quests are nice, the rings, necro staff etc, so some good stuff there. Then you have the raid weapons, and to be honest, I looked over the ones that have been seen and pretty much none other than the SS for my rogue looked interesting at all, which is good, I can avoid that stupid raid then.

It really boils down to the expansion being a couple of nice areas (the explorer areas were done really well), some nice quests and some that are just wayyyyy too short, I'm not expecting every quest to be a 2 hour event, but some of the new quests are pretty pathetic, and the epic destinies that range from pretty bad to awesome. Plus a whole bucket load of bugs.

Feather is a bigger douche than you and that's saying something.

Friendly and funny...  you know if I released code this buggy I would be too fucking embarrassed to be joking around.

Kracky wrote on Jul 27^th, 2012 at 2:29pm:



Usually we are our own worst enemies.

FotS should not try to be "Friendly and Funny" until he does the things he says he will.

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=364876 - this seems to be fairly representative of Turbine's efforts.

"I think I fixed it, where 'fixed' means it works for people who do not play the game more than a couple hours a month in an environment that is not customer facing.

Of course I could test this fix to see if it really works after I release it to Live, but I won't because as I said before, I'm pretty sure I've nailed it, and that's good enough."


They earn most of the crap they get.


They "fix" things that are not broken "while they were in there" without publicly documenting the change (for example, Shroud Blades) while ignoring high-profile issues.


http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?&postid=4609728#post4609728

Quote:


Sure it is, Feather.  Sure it is.  I sincerely hope you surprise me this time.


I don't dislike MajMal, but neither do I like him.

He had a chance to make a difference, or at least to make it seem that it things were moving away from "bag of ass", but things sure feel the same as they did before he announced that he would try to make things better.


There are some things to like about the changes and additions to the game, but they are very easy to forget when there are so many highly visible gaffs that go unacknowledged and are seemingly ignored for years.


But, hey, have you noticed that nobody is complaining about Ladders anymore?

Smrti wrote on Jul 27^th, 2012 at 4:02pm:

You missed his .

Nobody is complaining about ladders anymore because they're too busy raging out on the xp nerfing, broken raid, and shit loot.

I like MajMal.  I think he's doing the best he can with what's provided.  I think he's wants to do more, but some things are beyond his control

Major Mal probably had the best of intentions and was very excited when he got there.

Then he learned the hard reality of the QA department in any software company.   You are there to test the software, but you really aren't going to have the power stop any release from going out if management is at a hard deadline.

And management is going to be at a hard deadline that is not long enough because they believed the developers when the developers told them "We can code all this in 5 months". 

Then Management publicly tells their customers "MotU will be out in 6 months".

They give a month for testing... because testing should essentially be running the code the devs gave you and the approving it..... but wait, you found bugs... Wait, this means the devs have to do more coding... but they said they'd only need to code for 5 months... this gave you 1 month to run all your test plans to make sure it all worked.... so, let me get this straight... if you find bugs while running your test plan, then the devs have to make fixes, and then you have to start all over on your test plan that takes 1 month to run??!?!?!


Trust me.  I know this.   Management never understands the QA process.  You can explain it over and over, but they always EXPECT very few bugs to be in that code the programmers write.


Seriously, look at the Underdark and slaves you free.

Back when Amrath was released, A New Invasion has that optional about freeing prisoners.   at initial release, everyone in the party could open the dialog to free a prisoner.  Once everyone had it open, then you could all click at your leisure in the conversation to free it, and get credit for free 6 prisoners for each actual prisoner (Assuming you had 6 people in party).

Well, several updates later, Turbine made changes to it.  They didn't fix it completely, but now you have to have everyone synchronize their "freeing of the prisoner" and then you usually only get 2 or 3.


Well, in the Underark, the freeing of the slaves is back to the initial way the freeing of the prisoners worked in amrath.

Six people can get the dialog open at the same time...  Then everyone can attempt to free them at their leisure.  Doesn't matter how long it takes... the slave could be walking away from already freed 1 minute earlier, but as long as you have the dialog open you get credit for it.


So, here you have a process for this type of action that was fixed a long time to prevent this kind of exploit, but somewhere it was completely lost on the programmers.

With the breadth and scope of this game, the QA department is going to have to make a lot of assumptions when they are testing and attempting regression tests.   One of these assumptions would be "Well, we didn't expect the fucking programmers to fix this in one place, but then not use that same code here".

Mushrooms are doors.

bob the builder wrote on Jul 27^th, 2012 at 4:23pm:


QFT. My email sig at work contains the line "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" because of the number of times I've seen this happen.

Quote:


I love you sometimes. /validated

Smrti wrote on Jul 27^th, 2012 at 4:56pm:


This would solve soooo many problems.

The sad thing is, the ESOS was nerfed and it is still that amazing.

bob the builder wrote on Jul 30^th, 2012 at 8:48am:

I've seen the dirty underside of game code, I still have a couple rev's of EQ's source laying around here somewhere.  Rewriting the whole thing would take time, yes, but fixing the code rather than hacking the shit out of it over and over would take less time if they just did it.  Our armchair code guy and the nuclear physicist we had working on the project would take a couple hours a night and fixed things that had never worked in the emulator & specifically focused on hacks that had been written in.

Biggest thing about DDO is it seems everything is hard coded, right down to what items are generated in chests.  I also think the folks that originally wrote it, wrote it with the express idea they would be indispensable if they made it hard to understand.